It's Not Love
Why baby, why?
The note was under her coffee mug.
She saw it the way she saw everything at 6 a.m., through the wrong end of herself.
The bottom of the mug was wet. The note stuck to it as she picked it up.
The kitchen smelled like damp wool and that heavy sweet cologne Donny bought by the gallon. It sat in the back of her throat.
It hurts to stay.
She read it twice. Her handwriting. Blue pen, the one she kept by the phone. Block letters, which she only did when she was being careful.
She stood there in her socks on the kitchen tile, heel damp where she’d stepped in last night’s dishwater and never wiped it up. The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, someone was already leaving for work, footsteps in the hall moving away.
I don’t remember writing this.
She folded it in half, put it in the junk drawer, and made her coffee.
The lab was twenty minutes by bus. She liked the bus. Nobody talked to her and she could watch the city happen through scratched plexiglass, separate from it without trying.
Donny used to say she had a gift for disappearing in plain sight. She’d written it in her journal that night, Donny says I have a gift, and only later, much later, understood what he meant.
At work she ran a standard antibody panel, nothing complicated. A number sat outside the expected range.
She ran it again, same sample, same panel.
Perfectly inside range.
She looked at what she’d written the first time. Compared it to the rerun.
You just got lucky, Donny said, from three weeks ago, from inside her head.
She documented the final result and moved on.
She slept badly and woke at 3:17.
The apartment was cold. She could feel it on her face while the rest of her stayed under the blanket.
The refrigerator light was on. The door looked shut anyway. A thin white line leaked from under it.
Her mouth tasted like pennies.
She got up and checked the junk drawer. The note was still there, folded in half. Her handwriting. Blue pen.
She closed the drawer and went back to bed.
She did not sleep again until 5.
She found the second note on Thursday.
This one was in her coat pocket. The good coat, the wool one she only wore on cold mornings. She put it on and pushed her hands into the pockets and stood there in the doorway with a piece of paper between her fingers before she understood what she was holding.
There's nothing left to take.
Her handwriting. Blue pen. Block letters.
She stood there long enough to miss the 7:40 bus and had to wait for the 8:05 and she was twelve minutes late to the lab, which had never happened, not once. Her supervisor, Dr. Paulson, looked at her and she said car trouble and her supervisor nodded and that was that.
She didn’t own a car. She didn’t even have a license. Donny drove. Donny always drove.
His car was still in their lot. It hadn’t moved in three weeks.
That night she couldn’t find the blue pen.
She looked in the junk drawer, by the phone, in her work bag, in the cup on her desk where she kept pens.
Nothing.
She had other pens. Red, black. No blue ones.
She sat at the kitchen table for a while with her hands flat on the surface.
Then the smell hit her. Faint and wet-sweet, like something left too long in a closed place.
Drakkar Noir. Donny’s cologne.
Her mouth filled with spit and she swallowed it back.
She checked the door. Locked. She checked the windows. Locked. Then she stood in the middle of the apartment and breathed through her mouth and waited for her heart to do something reasonable.
The refrigerator hummed.
She went to bed with the light on and woke at 3:17 and the apartment was cold and the refrigerator light was on again.
She did not check the junk drawer.
On Friday she mislabeled a sample.
Nobody was hurt, but it was still the kind of mistake that required an incident report and a conversation with Dr. Paulson.
“You seem tired, Lisa.”
“I’m fine.”
“Everything okay at home?”
She thought about the notes in her handwriting. The blue pen she couldn't find. Waking at 3:17 every night for three weeks, since Donny stopped answering, and how the apartment ran cold. She thought about the fridge light. She thought about the lie forming in her mouth like it lived there now.
“Yes,” she said.
Dr. Paulson wrote something down without looking at the form. His pen scratched once, paused, then scratched again.
That weekend she pulled everything out of the junk drawer and laid it on the kitchen table. Batteries, expired coupons, a broken watch, three pennies, a thumbtack, a key she couldn’t place, the folded notes.
She sat with them closed for a while.
Then she unfolded them flat.
You know it wasn’t real.
You made me.
There was a third one she didn’t remember seeing before. Didn’t remember putting in the drawer. It was tucked inside the first note. Folded into it.
It's not love anymore.
Lisa sat with them for a long time. Outside it was Saturday and the city was doing Saturday things. In here, it was very quiet and very cold and she was looking at her own handwriting, trying to remember the last time she’d been certain about something.
The lab. She’d been certain at the lab.
Until Friday.
She got up and went to the desk in the corner of her living room where she did her bills. She looked in the cup and saw the blue pen.
It was there.
Same chewed cap. Same faint smear of ink near the clip that she’d never been able to scrub off. It sat in her fingers like it always had, familiar enough to make her angry.
She stood at the kitchen counter and uncapped it.
She watched from slightly outside herself. Her hand moved slow and careful, the way it moved when she was labeling vials. She understood, standing there, that she would fold this one and put it somewhere and find it later and not remember. That was how it worked. That was how it had been working for longer than she wanted to admit. Something had slipped, some gear jumped its track, and now she could see the mechanism.
Seeing it changed nothing.
Her hand stopped.
She looked at what she’d written long enough to know she’d gotten it right. Then she folded it before she could read it again.
She capped the pen and put it back in the cup and slid the note into her coat pocket, the good wool coat hanging by the door.
The refrigerator hummed. The light under the door stayed on.
Under the hum, the air held that faint wet-sweet edge again, just for a second.
Outside someone was leaving, footsteps in the hall moving away, and she didn’t know their name and it didn’t matter.
Lisa went to bed.
She woke at 3:17 and the apartment was cold.
She didn’t check the pocket.
She already knew what it said.
The worst part was how relieved she felt.
This time, she’d gotten the wording right.
This time, she’d gotten lucky.